ConwayLife.com

77topaz wrote:I think forcing users to "chat f2f" with admins would be excessive, and would just put off prospective real new users more than anything. This particular spammer always uses the same text in their posts - so a filter that blocks messages if they contain (part of) that text ought to do the trick (I've seen that used successfully to stop spam attacks on other phpBB forums).

    if (content == null || content.contains("href") || content.length() <= 1 || content.contains(".js")) {

        // Rickroll the potential spammer:
        resp.sendRedirect("https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ");

    } else if (content.length() >= 5 && (content.substring(content.length() - 5).equals(".html"))) {

        resp.sendRedirect("https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ");

    } else {

            Date date = new Date();
            Entity comment = new Entity("Comment", threadKey);
            comment.setProperty("user", user);
            comment.setProperty("date", date);
            comment.setProperty("content", new Text(content));

            DatastoreService datastore = DatastoreServiceFactory.getDatastoreService();
            datastore.put(comment);

            resp.sendRedirect(req.getParameter("redirectLocation"));
    }

Apple Bottom wrote:And here's a robot reposting random snippets originally written by others in a variety of threads.

• Force new users to wait a certain time period before they're allowed to post
• Moderate all new users' posts; new users will require a certain number of positively moderated posts before they're allowed to post unmoderatedly
• Limit the number of posts by new users, or disallow them from creating new threads
• Automatically block posts that contain certain terms (i.e. those commonly used by spammers)

dvgrn wrote:Yikes, this is a relatively scary one. At least one of those posts was on-target enough that it didn't immediately make me suspicious (though it was also vague enough that I wasn't tempted to try to answer it).

All cleaned up for now. Here's hoping whoever-it-is gives up and goes elsewhere -- that bot managed almost a dozen posts in a few minutes, and that kind of thing from too many different sources could start to challenge our collective cleanup capacity.

Majestas32 wrote:Limiting the number of posts by new users (like only 1 post in the first day) is good

77topaz wrote:On other phpBB forums that have had spam problems, I've seen the following attempted solutions that could also be useful here:

• Force new users to wait a certain time period before they're allowed to post
• Moderate all new users' posts; new users will require a certain number of positively moderated posts before they're allowed to post unmoderatedly
• Limit the number of posts by new users, or disallow them from creating new threads
• Automatically block posts that contain certain terms (i.e. those commonly used by spammers)

David wrote:Would you have me trusted: David?

grabadora305 wrote:I was told I have to come here to request the trusted flag?

grabadora305 wrote:I think every edit will just have to be approved by the admins, that way readers won't see the spam edits.

77topaz wrote:I suspect that this comment is from a spambot. It's a new user (written only five minutes after they registered) commenting on a thread that's been dead since 2012; the post does not contain any spam links in itself, and while the text is something that could theoretically have been written by a real person ("I understand what you bring it very meaningful and useful, thanks.", there you go, Majestas), it a) is written with rather poor grammar (often indicative of bots), b) doesn't contain any meaningful content at all (you can often see comments like this in unmoderated comment chains like those on Catagolue, in such quantities that indicate they must be spam), and c) the profile and signature of the user do contain links, which don't appear to be related to CA and so are probably spam.

Coincidentally (or maybe not), the comment directly above it from 2012 also looks like it was probably made by spambot, for many of the same reasons (though the text in it is of a more technical nature, it doesn't actually make any sense, and all of the other descriptions of the 2018 post also apply to the 2012 one).

Apple Bottom wrote:

77topaz wrote:... c) the profile and signature of the user do contain links, which don't appear to be related to CA and so are probably spam ...

Both of these do have spam links, BTW --- in their signatures rather than the bodies of their posts.